In this paper, we analyze the announcement effect of private equity placements on issuers, investors and rivals. We find that announcing firms experience positive and significant abnormal returns during the announcement period, which imply that issuing firms are undervalued and investing firms also gain small but significantly positive abnormal returns. We find that investors’ stock price reactions are significantly positive related to the issuers’. Furthermore, we find that rival firms experience significantly positive abnormal returns during the announcements of their industry counterparts. We find that no matter what the purpose of private placement is, the contagion effect dominates the competitive effect. Consistent with previous literatures, the contagion effect is stronger in industries with a low degree of competition than in industries with a high degree of competition.